Augusta Played Read Online Free PDF

that only art touched. Art seemed to her to have become a person. A man. A Mann man. Redheaded. She said, “Art’s touch is cold.” She didn’t know why she said that. It wasn’t what she believed.
    Nobody answered her.
    It became important to her to get a response, so she said, “It’s like a crematorium that hasn’t been used in twenty years, if you want to know the truth. Art’s touch.”
    Still nobody said anything, but she wouldn’t let it drop. “What I mean is,” she said, “art is a kind of stony vault in which the ashes of our ancestors are housed. Even physicists’ ashes. Even the ashes of dead dictators.”
    The Berliner capitulated. “Even that is to make of art a utility,” he said, “like the water service or electric power. My wife says, there is an artist named Paul Jenkins, who has publicly consumed a canvas of pears, to illustrate that pears are for eating, not painting.”
    And at that, Gus and Norman glanced shyly at each other and fell in love all over again. They were on the same side after all! Augusta asked the Berliner, “What did they taste like?”—meaning the pears. And Norman said, “If you ask me, that’s an extremely untrustworthy teleology.”
    The man seemed offended. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What teleology?”
    â€œLook,” Gus said, leaning over the table animatedly; her hair, grazing the table top, was so blond it hurt Norman’s eyes. “Suppose a pear’s most salient characteristic, the one that juts out from the others, is its shape. After all, I defy you to describe how a pear tastes; isn’t it a bland taste, like gritty pudding? And consider the shape of the pear, how it glows , a mock light bulb. Maybe pears were meant for mock lamps. You’ll say, What do I want with a mock lamp? But that’s a whole different problem, to wit, our supply of mock lamps exceeds the demand for them!” Her eyes glittered, reflecting the incredible dark yellow of her hair, and on her finger the lustrous pearl gleamed, like a third, anomalous eye. Now when she turned toward Norman, he felt charged by her energy, and they left hand in hand, in good spirits, victorious.
    7
    N ORMAN HAD TO BREAK the news to his father. He did not look forward to doing this. Well, part of him looked forward to it.
    He took the subway to Brooklyn and went straight to the old man’s office. The way he had it figured, it was wiser to tell his father personally in private; his mother would go along with anything. His mother’s philosophy was, Never complain because it’s all free anyway. “It” was life. His father’s was, Nothing is free—they take it out of your hide every day and the best you can hope for is a decent return on your investment. This argument had been going on for the whole of Norman’s time on earth, which now totaled twenty-eight years.
    Waiting in the anteroom, Norman smoked a cigarette, taking exaggerated drags to keep his throat from locking. He cracked his knuckles. There was no window in the waiting room but otherwise it was posh: paisley pillows and rubber plants, plenty of walnut paneling. Jocelyn’s IBM typewriter looked like the computer bank on Star Trek .
    The luxury didn’t hide the odor of hard work. The toil was there, even if it was neatly filed away in steel cabinets. In a way, Norman thought it was obscene of his father to go on working at his age; a man that old was a fool to lust after the law. By the time Jocelyn let him in, Norman was furious, but he could follow the line of his fury back to the Talmud, and he knew better than to blame his father for the sins of his fathers. For all those generations, law had been the truly beloved, embraced warmly like the Simchath Torah. Understanding inhibited him. Tolerantly, he said to his father, “You’re looking fit.” It was like starting an